Setting the Scope of Your Research

The first question facing you as you explore the possibilities of investigating money in politics is how big a chunk of contribution records you should try to examine. This question obviously depends on the resources you've got available - computer equipment, staffing, and time. It also depends on what state you're looking at. Categorizing all the contributions for the North Dakota legislature is one thing; doing it for California is quite another. No matter which state you examine, time and staffing are the crucial variables, since you can put together a database on virtually any computer you've got at your disposal. All you need is enough storage space on your hard drive, and just about any off-the-shelf database program. Even a spreadsheet will do for the data-entry part of the job if that's all you've got.

The ideal scope for a project would be a database that covers the entire state legislature, plus the governor and other top statewide elected officials. On a more local level, the entire city council is an obvious target, as are the candidates for mayor and, possibly, county commissioners. One way to cut down your workload is to restrict the research to only those candidates who were actually elected. You'll miss a lot of the money, clearly, but you'll have the most important data that you need when reporting on legislative issues. Another way to cut it - again, a compromise, but one to consider - is limiting your database to only those contributions over a certain amount, say $100 or $250 and above.

If the whole state legislature is too big a chunk to start with, a good way to pare down the scope of your project is to restrict it to one part of the legislature. You could do just the state Senate or the House, you could concentrate on the house and senate leadership, or you could focus on one or a few key committees. If you can't take on the whole legislature, the next best thing is to do it by committee. Though voters rarely give it a thought, the real nuts and bolts work of the U.S. Congress, and most state legislatures, takes place at the committee level. In the Congress, and in the states, certain of those committees are important centers of power - and focal points for intensive lobbying and energetic contributions.

The House Ways and Means Committee, for example, which crafts the nation's tax laws, is crucial to virtually every business (and individual) in America. The Armed Services Committees and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittees can spell fiscal life or death for defense contractors. The House Energy and Commerce Committee - little known outside Washington - sets national policy for health care, telecommunications, the oil and gas industry, the securities and financial industries, electric utilities, railroads and a wide swath of other important industries. A seat on that committee, which virtually guarantees a generous supply of PAC contributions year after year, is one of the most sought-after assignments on Capitol Hill. Similar powerhouse committees exist in every state capitol. Focus your investigation on those committees and you will find the biggest centers of campaign funds in your state. You will likely also find the most direct correlations between campaign contributions and legislative actions. So if you can't do the whole legislature right away, start with a few top committees and expand your research later.

One important point on committees: if your state senators have longer terms than state house or assembly members (which almost every state does), concentrate on the lower house first. When lawmakers have to run every two years, their complete fundraising cycle will coincide with the normal two-year election cycle. In the U.S. Congress, where senators run only once every six years, you've got to look at a full six years of history (or three two-year election cycles) to get an accurate view of all the money going to a particular senate committee. Senators typically raise most of their money in the two years leading up to their reelection race, so if you review fundraising for the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1992 election cycle, for example, you'll find that the biggest recipients of campaign cash were those with races in 1992. To get the full picture of who's been getting what you need to look back six full years. Keep that important point in mind as you begin your project. If you're doing your project committee-by-committee, it makes a lot more sense to start with the lower chamber and work up - particularly if you're short on time or resources.

STRATEGIC ALLIANCES

This is a good a point to bring up a subject that ought to be considered as you're beginning to plan your project: is it important that you do it alone, or might it be possible to enter into a strategic alliance with another organization to help with the work? In some places, the competition between news organizations is so intense that the thought of a joint venture would be enough to scuttle the project outright. Two competing newspapers in the same city might be loathe to cooperate on anything, let alone on a database that could provide a rich lode of stories for months and years to come. But many other partnership possibilities may exist. Two Florida newspapers - the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times- cooperated for a number of years in compiling a database of contributions to the Florida legislature. Other papers joined in at various times. Their readership areas, by and large, didn't overlap, and each paper successfully mined the database for unique stories.

Since ongoing analysis of the state legislature would probably be the highest priority in just about every state, similar cooperatives could be worked out almost anywhere, if the news organizations are willing to share resources.

Another possibility is teaming up with an academic or other non-profit research organization. A partnership with a university research group could provide a great deal of assistance to a news organization, as well as supplying rich material for class projects and case studies for the academics. You may well want to do a project on your own, but if you could use a hand with resources, and don't mind sharing at least a portion of your findings, don't rule out the idea of forming a partnership with another organization.

SETTING UP A CONGRESSIONAL DATABASE

There's one other option you might want to consider, if the thought of entering thousands of records is too daunting - set up a database of contributors to congressional candidates. A logical slice here would be to include all the members of your state delegation, plus any current candidates. Frankly, this is something every news organization ought to have, both in its newsroom and its Washington bureau. It's also an excellent (and mostly painless) way to get started with a contributor database, since the data is already available electronically from the Federal Election Commission. Even better, you can get a database of contributions already coded into industry and interest group categories from the Center for Responsive Politics, or its affiliate, the National Library on Money & Politics.

The Center's coding process is not a quick one - we tend to be several months behind in PAC contributions and much longer behind in coding individuals - but at least all the work (or most of it, anyway) is already done. All you have to do is set up the database structure and import the records. The same is true of the FEC data (you just need to import the records), but the FEC doesn't standardize employers or apply category codes to PACs and individual contributions. Nevertheless, there's no data entry involved with a congressional database (unless you're trying to keep current with the latest election year filings), so the biggest single labor-intensive part of setting up the database is already done.

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